D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[robertsconley]

It helps, but I still think it ignores some practical limits of process, as I explain in my discussion with Micah earlier. In some cases its not just more work: its not possible given location (which is not a physical issue per se, but very much can limit the scheduling issue) and technical situations. And that's ignoring the fact that many people (I'm not one of them to be clear) find remote play actively defeats what they want out of a game.

So in practice, they're just as much limited to what's available locally as they ever were.

I’m pushing back because I’ve lived my whole life in a rural county, with my primary system being GURPS from the late ’80s to the late 2000s. While I agree it takes effort, I strongly disagree with the idea that the situation hasn’t vastly improved for niche systems, I just don’t buy it.

That said, people should absolutely keep giving advice on how to connect with others who share their interests. Just because things are much better now doesn’t mean help isn’t still needed.

 

[Campbell]

So, it's not about forcing anyone - it's about choosing to play with people (including other players) who embrace accountability, want to be held accountable and just as crucially will hold others accountable. It's not all that serious either. We're not holding after action reports or debriefings. Just laying out expectations and being like let's play that game, see how it goes.

The idea that this is an untenable social arrangement is a little silly to me because I have pretty much spent my entire life in this high accountability environments. Now as a software developer who works on a product that Fortune 500 companies depend on, formerly as a soldier in the United States Army, in community theater, in intramural sports, in high school football and wrestling, hell as part of multiple raiding guilds in World of Warcraft.

I don't think it's right for everyone, but it's damn sure right for me and the people I play with. We have standards for each other. We embrace the games we're playing instead of our individual desires. A couple weeks back I had a conversation that set me straight in one of the games I'm playing in about inadvertently playing to a different premise than what we agreed on and I'm glad the other player held my feet to the fire. I'm also glad that while I was running Blades in the Dark the players reminded me in moments where I stepped out of the game's principles. Correcting these things made for a better play experience.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was responding to a post that cited lack of perfection as the reason to codify stuff.

So, if perfection isn't required, there must be some point that is "good enough" that we can trust GMs to handle things.

No. At some point we just expect that the occasional failures of process are part of the biz. That's not a trust issue, that's a practical acceptance that certain events are too rare or out-of-the-box to be worth the effort.

And that shows us the problem, doesn't it? Who gets to say what is good enough?

Does anyone here admit to personally not being good enough? Because, if not, this starts looking... kinda egotistical, folks.

Me? I'll freely admit as a GM I have problems that are still a work-in-progress after doing this for half a century. And while most of those are in things outside of a rules scope for the most part, sometimes I make really dumb decisions that would benefit from someone looking me in the eye and saying "You sure about that?"

If there wasn't such a common tendency to push back on people challenging GM decisions (yes, yes, interrupt the game, selfish attention, I've heard all the excuses) I'd be much more tolerant of people who want more of games to be ad-hoc. But it appears to me that what people who want more "rulings not rules" seem to usually feel is that they want it both ways.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But this issue doesn't go away by having more rigid rules curtailing GM powers

It wasn't to do with that, other than having to do with the difficulty of people finding games other than D&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I’m pushing back because I’ve lived my whole life in a rural county, with my primary system being GURPS from the late ’80s to the late 2000s. While I agree it takes effort, I strongly disagree with the idea that the situation hasn’t vastly improved for niche systems, I just don’t buy it.

That said, people should absolutely keep giving advice on how to connect with others who share their interests. Just because things are much better now doesn’t mean help isn’t still needed.

To be really blunt, you're one sample and I've heard at least a good couple dozen to the opposite, so you've got the right to push back, but its going to take more than a couple counter-examples to convince me.

(And again, I agree things have improved. There's just a big gap between "improved' and "non-issue").

 

[Bedrockgames]

It wasn't to do with that, other than having to do with the difficulty of people finding games other than D&D.

That is a tough one because D&D is pretty much RPGs to some people, and so popular. I make non-D&D games so I get the challenge. But I know I've played D&D games when I wanted to play something else (I mean if you are outvoted you are outvoted). I remember I really wanted to run HKAT! during the early 3E era and people were just not biting on the concept. I ended up having to make a martial arts D&D campaign with Oriental Adventures instead (the 3E version). While I would have preferred to get people on board for HKAT!, I understood people just weren't into it. And we used to play lots of CoC back in the day but during the d20 era, I couldn't get people to not play non-d20 games easily so I just ran the d20 version. I was kind of glad I did because that was one of the few d20 adaptations I really liked (and I wouldn't have discovered that without running it).

 

[Umbran]

Me? I'll freely admit as a GM I have problems that are still a work-in-progress after doing this for half a century. And while most of those are in things outside of a rules scope for the most part, sometimes I make really dumb decisions that would benefit from someone looking me in the eye and saying "You sure about that?"

Rules are not someone. Rules are an algorithm. Is an algorithm better than you?

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, it's not about forcing anyone - it's about choosing to play with people (including other players) who embrace accountability, want to be held accountable and just as crucially will hold others accountable. It's not all that serious either. We're not holding after action reports or debriefings. Just laying out expectations and being like let's play that game, see how it goes.

The idea that this is an untenable social arrangement is a little silly to me because I have pretty much spent my entire life in this high accountability environments. Now as a software developer who works on a product that Fortune 500 companies depend on, formerly as a soldier in the United States Army, in community theater, in intramural sports, in high school football and wrestling, hell as part of multiple raiding guilds in World of Warcraft.

I don't think it's right for everyone, but it's damn sure right for me and the people I play with. We have standards for each other. We embrace the games we're playing instead of our individual desires. A couple weeks back I had a conversation that set me straight in one of the games I'm playing in about inadvertently playing to a different premise than what we agreed on and I'm glad the other player held my feet to the fire. I'm also glad that while I was running Blades in the Dark the players reminded me in moments where I stepped out of the game's principles. Correcting these things made for a better play experience.

I'm fine with social accountability. I don't need mechanical accountability.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't think it's right for everyone, but it's damn sure right for me and the people I play with. We have standards for each other. We embrace the games we're playing instead of our individual desires. A couple weeks back I had a conversation that set me straight in one of the games I'm playing in about inadvertently playing to a different premise than what we agreed on and I'm glad the other player held my feet to the fire. I'm also glad that while I was running Blades in the Dark the players reminded me in moments where I stepped out of the game's principles. Correcting these things made for a better play experience.

This is kind of an important side-issue here; its not like play errors that cause problems are limited to GMs. Its just that in trad games a couple things run to true: 1. The GM's decisions tend to have more impact because they get to decide things a player just--doesn't. As such there are often far more ripple effects (I'm ignoring here certain chaos goblin sorts of play actions, because those are more analogous to the sort of deliberately malignant GMing I made clear I wasn't talking about earlier); 2. Most groups are taught to address problems through the central hub of the GM, rather than just looking at another player and trying to address it directly (not that that's always a smooth process either, since some players can get very prickly about other people telling them how to play, but getting people to look at the game as a whole and not just what they want out of it would make a lot of games run a lot smoother).

 

[Campbell]

Here's my personal view. That when you are stepping outside of norms formalizing things helps a lot more. I think when you are playing and running a more conventional game you can get away most relying on implicit expectations and a lack of formal process. But a lack of formal processes and especially expectations makes it much harder to execute on less typical play.

It really does not help that every voice I've ever heard call for a lack of formal expectations has thoroughly conventional ones they assume as a baseline. It's personally hard to not see that call as a way to push the hobby away from less conventional play or at very least to not include it within the broader conversation.

Especially because a lot of the same voices who are now calling for a lack of formal expectations were once trying to throw conventional play into the story games ghetto.